The End of October

by Lawrence Wright

DISEASES HAVE A history of stirring up conspiracies. Jews were held responsible for the Black Plague in the fourteenth century, and they were massacred in hundreds of European cities, including two thousand Jews burned alive in Strasbourg, France, on Valentine’s Day, 1349. When severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) first appeared, Sergei Kolesnikov, a member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, charged that the new disease was a man-made synthetic virus that combined measles and mumps, although they are both paramyxoviruses and could not be the basis of a coronavirus. This fallible theory took root in China, which was loathe to assume responsibility for being the point of origin of the disease. A rumor spread like a contagion that only the United States was capable of genetically engineering such a disease, and that it had been deliberately seeded in China to retard its growth as a world superpower.